


Fractured

by Klicesgirl16



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-09
Updated: 2014-07-09
Packaged: 2018-02-08 01:58:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1922433
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Klicesgirl16/pseuds/Klicesgirl16
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Since I feel like Malia's character has so much potential but was completely glossed over, I felt that she needed more exposition. You can't just throw her into the series, then give her a random make-out scene with Stiles and then expect us to immediately take to her. This takes place in Eichen House while Stiles is trying to suppress the Nogitsune.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fractured

Stiles was completely alone. But the most painful thing was watching his dad leave after finding any possible excuse to take Stiles back with him. To keep him from ‘the crazy house’. To keep him close in order to protect him. _But he can’t,_ Stiles thought morosely. _This is the best thing I can do for him...even if it means hurting him._  
Stiles had always been cognizant of Scott’s feelings surrounding Allison, but now he had a new appreciation for their since-cooled relationship. Keeping one’s loved ones at an arm’s length just to spare them from harm was cliched for a reason. The pain was very, very real.  
Every sign showed Stiles that he did not belong here. Not only had he witnessed a man hang himself, but had also encountered people who could barely function. But the security detail was its one selling point. Especially the Miss Ratchet-esque-but-male Head of Security, who spent no time at all proving the extent of his dominion over the place.  
Oliver, Stiles’ cell mate, was not one for pleasant conversation, but despite this being a flaw to most people it almost helped. In fact it probably helped more than Stiles thought it would. Oliver’s disconcerting discourse surrounding Eichen House is part of what kept Stiles awake. It kept his mind going. If the wheels stopped, he’d turn off and go to sleep like a fish that stopped swimming, and with a dark thing lurking behind the door to his mind left ajar and out of his reach, he could not afford to stop swimming. He had to keep going, or it would win. It would usurp his consciousness, his conscience and quite probably his soul.  
Much of his free time he spent in the mess hall. To exercise his empathy in order to continually prove he was himself, he people-watched. He tried to gather context clues about their life. There was one kid, Roger, who had a nervous tick that made him constantly crack his knuckles and blink his eyes rapidly, as if trying to see more clearly at something his mind could not process. Maybe it was a traumatic event he was repressing. Stiles knew a bit about psychology, having spent many an hour looking at police profiles and watching Criminal Minds. Maybe he had a bad set of genes that predisposed to this condition and one bully just set him off.  
Stiles had had plenty of time to deduce about Oliver, but then again, Oliver had willingly provided much of the information himself, so that almost completely negated the point of the exercise.  
And then there was the girl he had helped Scott save from being shot with a rifle by her own father. Malia. She would sit alone at a table and stare out the window. Her nose would wrinkle as if smelling something funny. But if she did in fact smell anything, she leaned towards the window. _Groundskeepers? Are they laying pesticide or something? Manure?_ As subtly as he could, Stiles peered out the window in the same direction as Malia, but he saw nor smelled anything. He also noted that the windows were shut and locked tight. It didn’t take a Sherlock Holmes to deduce that had come around because of a serious nuisance in the past. Escapees and what not.  
She would tilt her head to the side and slide her ears forward or side to side and then furrow her brow in frustration. Stiles took a step towards her and she whipped her head around to look at him. Her gaze was standoffish. “How’s it going?” Stiles said, trying to be friendly as he sat down. “I’m Stiles. We’ve met. Scott and I turned you back.”  
“I’m aware,” she said. “You introduced yourself already. I don’t have memory loss. I was a coyote for eight years, I wasn't in a coma.”  
“You say that so casually.”  
“I don’t see the point,” she lolled her head back to the window, tilting very far down as she brought her left foot up to scratch her ear. She tossed her hair around as she shook it off. “In lying. You say the truth and they think you’re nuts, you tell them a lie and they know you’re hiding something.”  
“Yeah, if I told them I was possessed by something that wants to kill my friends they’d be like ‘well thank God that whacko’s here.’” He had tried to incite a laugh, but did not get one.  
Malia straightened suddenly and hunched forward. It was not hard for Stiles to conjure an image of her hackles being raised. She almost jumped on the table, half-sitting half-standing on all fours focused primarily on something out the window. Stiles saw the squirrel. Malia focused her entire body and mind on the prospect of catching and, Stiles had no doubt, devouring that squirrel. She pulled her lips back and started crouching, ignoring the fact that the window was there.  
But she didn’t get to act upon her instincts, because security had heard the gasps of the other Eichen residents at Malia’s leap onto the table. They came in swiftly and dragged her away, sticking her with sedative-filled needles.  
The one other person who Stiles felt some sort of connection to was a girl named Meredith, who had been whispering into an inactive phone about him with surprisingly accurate information, despite the fact her interlocutor was imaginary. That and the phone wasn't connected. Stiles pondered that. _The line between schizophrenic and Banshee has become surprisingly thin._ He wanted to tell Lydia that. She’d probably hit him, but get a kick out of it all the same. But there was no phone. And if he did have one, the kind of destruction or horrible sociopathy that could ensue wouldn't be worth it. _Even if it_ was _really clever._  
But Meredith wanted to keep her distance, and was content with avoiding Stiles altogether. Whenever he approached her, her doe eyes would widen to the likeness of dinner plates and she would shy away from him as a helpless horror movie character would from an oncoming bus. What was worse was that she would start rambling rapidly about what Stiles knew to be the Nogitsune inhabiting his psyche, dormant, waiting for the first opportunity to release itself. This of course drew the attention of security, who hauled her away. And then after that he would get punished and locked in his room for causing disturbances. This isolated Stiles further, and put him closer to the madness he was being accused of and further from his ability to occupy his mind with social behavior and healthy interaction. Well, “healthy” in the relative term. He was in a modernized sanitorium.  
When Stiles was finally able to regain his free-time privileges in the mess hall, he was forced to content himself to people-watch only. Malia and Meredith were his main focuses; the former for empathetic reasons and curiosity as to what Malia thought of being human, why she wanted to go back, just how much of her was one way or the other, while the latter was walking the line between his deductions. Stiles wanted to have a conclusion. It gave him something to strive for, it gave him something to pull him from sleep while Malia proved more of a mystery of compassion.  
Malia and him were both monitored by the people patrolling the room. They could feel the glances of their security bore holes into the backs of their heads like the heat from a rotating lighthouse lantern. Except six of them. But this almost drew an invisible kinship between them. At least according to Stiles, _though that may be a sign of the dementia,_ he thought grimly. Malia’s face was usually a look of wild interest, of an immersion in her own ability to use her senses to understand. But she looked more longing than usual just then. Stiles’ gaze followed hers and he saw a woman walking her dog down the street. They had a little girl with them. The little girl was holding her mom’s hand and tottering behind in little rainbow rain boots with a pink umbrella. The dog, whenever it stopped to sniff, was barraged by the toddler’s attempts to pet it lovingly and to smother it with kisses. Even when it crouched down to defecate, the child persisted until the mom pulled her away. Stiles tried to crack whether Malia envied the child or the dog.  
***  
Stiles lasted for a week before the Nogitsune’s peripheral presence started boring down on him with unbearable force. He saw it in his waking hours, and dreaded it in the darkness when lying in his bed. Every shadow contained the possibility of its evil seeping out like his cold sweat as it beaded down his forehead. He could hear its voice in his head, cooing, goading, conniving its way out. He had to blink hard and count his fingers to ensure that the darkness of the room was not a conjuration of his subconscious, a part of another dream. He took a crayon from the mess hall once and snuck it back at bedtime so that he could write on the wall. He wrote the names of people he loved; ‘Scott’, ‘Allison’ ‘Dad’ and ‘Lydia’. _If I can’t read them, I’m dreaming. And when I’m awake, they’ll be my anchors,_ he thought hopefully, but with little enthusiasm. _Even though they’re not here._  
Oliver was no help. He tried to encourage Stiles to accept himself rather than fight the descent he explained was inevitable. Stiles resolved to tune him out more.  
But that week he had a visitor. Scott. Stiles embraced him more warmly than he had in a long time. It was recalling tears to his eyes before the thought crossed his mind that he was within ripping distance of Scott’s neck if he just opened his mouth and dug in.  
Stiles shook his whole body, which alarmed Scott and pulled away from the hug. A quick pause and Scott started trying to distract Stiles by asking neutral questions. “So how are things?”  
Stile scratched the back of his head innocently. “Everything’s okay, I guess.”  
“You haven’t slept in a while.”  
Stiles puffed out his cheeks as he exhaled. “If I do, someone will get hurt. It’s practically a science at this point.”  
“We’re figuring this out as fast as we can,” Scott assured. They looked over and Meredith was at the phone, mumbling hateful speech into the inactive device.  
“Hi, Meredith!” Stiles waved at her sarcastically. Meredith shirked away as if his words were stingers swarming about her, swatting them away with one hand.  
“That’s Meredith,” he said to Scott.  
“Yeah,” Scott nodded and snickered. “So is everyone here…?”  
“Possessed by a homicidal demon spirit? Nope, even in a hive of weirdos, _I'm_ the odd one out. Everyone here is normal. I mean, relatively. You know, considering. They’ve got the normal reasons to be here.”  
“Besides Malia.”  
“If she were anymore ready to go back to being a coyote, she’d be getting Acme boxes and going by ‘Wile E’.”  
“Have you been able to talk to her?”  
“Not much, no.”  
He turned around and saw Malia staring intently at Scott from her seat at the table. She swept over Stiles momentarily before returning her eyes to Scott. But then she was mesmerized by something outside and returned to gazing out the window.  
“How’s she doing?”  
“Well, I ran into her in the bathroom.”  
Scott looked at him like a crazy person, which was apt considering they were standing in the mess hall of Eichen House. “What were you doing in the girl’s room?”  
“The GUY’S BATHROOM,” Stiles clarified, gesticulating desperately. “I’m not a perv. Weirdo, fine, hangs out with werewolves and banshees, guilty, you caught me, but I’m not a creep.”  
“Well what was she doing in there then?”  
“Showering.”  
Scott raised his eyebrows. It made Stiles as uncomfortable recanting the story as it was living through it. “She said she couldn’t get warm with the whole ‘fur coat’ thing. And apparently the guy’s bathroom has better hot water. Don’t make it weirder than it already is.”  
Scott had to hide his smile, but ultimately failed because his friend was too observant from insomnia not to notice.  
“So is she acclimating? You know, to being human?”  
“A nut house isn’t exactly the best example of ‘humanity’ Scott.”  
“But like, she’s talking to you, right?”  
“I mean, she said a sentence to me a while back, so yeah. I’d say that counts. She wants to turn back, Scott. She told me. Is that possible?”  
“She can’t turn back into a coyote?”  
Stiles shrugged. “Here, let me get my giant book of answers to all of life’s questions. Here it is," Stiles pantomimed pulling out a giant book from his pocket and started flipping invisible pages."Let's see, ‘why Malia can’t be a coyote forever when she was already one for eight years.’ Turns out it’s the page after ‘why am I possessed by an evil Japanese spirit that wants to kill all of my friends’!”  
Scott pulled back.  
“Sorry,” Stiles ran his hand through his hair.  
“It’s the not sleeping,” Scott nodded. “I understand. We’re doing our best. Kira’s helping us, as is her mom. We’re gonna figure this out, Stiles. We’ll get you out of here,” he put a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “Just hang in there.”  
Stiles nodded. His eyes fell on the logo on Scott’s shirt. “I didn’t know you knew Greek, Scott.”  
“I don’t…” Scott furrowed his brow. He looked at his shirt. “This is a band we both like. Linkin Park? The one we’ve known forever?”  
Stiles blinked hard, trying to clear the gibberish from in front of him and clenched his fists from the effort. He reminded himself of Roger then.  
The security guard picked that moment to intervene, perceiving that Stiles was apparently having an episode. Scott was unfortunately escorted out of the building and Stiles was led back to his room. He was strapped down and could only look on as Scott disappeared from his sight.  
He had only the names to comfort him, and there were points where he thought he could only read them because he had memorized their placement.  
***  
Stiles had to undergo close observation before being deemed viable to be let out into the mess hall. They had given him pills to sleep, but he hid them under his tongue and spit them into his hand which he watched dissolve in the little well of saliva he left. He shook it off, pretending to turn his wrists from anxiety - anxiety not difficult to fake, since much of it was very real. When he was finally able to interact with the other patients, he just sat down at a table in the corner and stared at the people walking by.  
“Hey.”  
He gave a start and turned to see Malia crouched in the chair sitting like a dog with her legs scrunched against the back of the chair. She was looking at him with as little interest as one could describe.  
“Oh, uh…” Stiles stuttered, trying to compose himself. “I, uh, hi.”  
“Hi,” she gave a superior crooked smirk. “Relax, I won’t bite you.”  
“Nah, I didn’t think you would,” Stiles faked coolness. He put on the epitome of coolness even though his heart was still racing from the surprise. “Though if I had snuck a meatball from the mess hall…”  
She turned away.  
“You’re...um…” Stiles struggled for a subject - any at all - to keep her attention. He craved it, he needed it. A conversation with a normal person...well, a normal-ish person that wasn’t a tormented spirit festering in his psyche like a terrible, open wound, was a welcome distraction from the terrible thoughts and the fear of his dreams. “You’re not in your usual spot.”  
“Call the guards, she’s gone crazy.” Her sarcasm was thicker than her eyebrows, which was saying something. Being a mostly feral person for half her life would do that to someone without a serious makeover intervention. They were quiet for a while, letting the joke sink in like one aerates a wine before sniffing it and then drinking it. “You never struck me as the type.”  
“As what type, insane?”  
She nodded. “Scott’s a werewolf, that girl you were with, the one with the blonde-ish hair-”  
“Lydia?”  
“She’s...something, definitely, that other guy with the light brown hair, he’s a werewolf. But what about you?”  
“Possessed.”  
She chuckled.  
“I wish I were kidding” he said defeated. The tiredness was wearing him thin, and defeat was imminent.  
Malia stuck her face in Stiles’ side, pushing him this way and that. “What are you doing?”  
Utter concentration hung on Malia’s face, tuning out everything else.  
“Does my shirt remind you of squirrels?”  
She popped her head up and shook it as if to shake off the darkness Stiles knew clung to him like a bad smell. “You don’t smell different. But you sound different.”  
“Different how?”  
“Hollow.”  
Stiles’ heart plummeted. “That’s how I feel sometimes. But it’s not so much that part of me is missing, but that there’s something else that doesn’t belong. Like there’s ‘me’ and then this ‘other’ and we’re fighting over who gets my body. If I go to sleep, then it starts winning.”  
“I feel that way, too.”  
Now that Stiles had unprecedented proximity to Malia, he was able to really look at her. Her hair was being combed, but probably not by her. Her eyebrows were mangy and unkempt. Her eyes still had the wild, unbridled look to them. Her nails were trimmed by the staff to prevent self-harm, but she had bitten them past the cuticle to sharpen them some to a sort of point. _Missing her claws?_ “Really?”  
Malia nodded. “I’ve been human before and after being a coyote. And I remember everything. I feel like that is definitely at least part of me, but not actually me. But I feel that way about being a coyote. Being human again without the coyote part makes me feel...incomplete.”  
“Fractured,” Stiles added.  
Malia nodded once more.  
“It’s like part of me is locked away,” Stiles continued. “But I’m not even sure it’s part of me. It’s pretty weird, but also terrifying.”  
“I want to get my other part back,” said Malia, “but it’s hidden. Locked up.”  
“Well I want that part of me to stay that way. If it wins, it gets all of me.”  
“That’s how I used to be when I had four legs. It’s Scott’s fault.”  
Stiles stared at her. “You can’t blame Scott for bringing you back. He didn’t do it thinking you’d never go back, he did it because…” he trailed off. “Actually it’s kind of complicated. My dad was trying to find you for the whole time you were running around catching rabbits with your mouth or whatever so he could keep his job. Your dad wanted closure, even though I guess we kind of did the opposite...and Scott and I wanted to feel like we were useful.”  
“So this 'act of heroism' had nothing to do with me?”  
Stiles was struck dumb.  
“You came to the crash. You went into my den. You took my doll. You chased me. Then you forced me to change back into a human and expected me to just continue my life as if nothing had happened. Just go from age eight to age sixteen and forget that puberty happened somewhere in between and just pretend that I could function in the human world. Meanwhile the part of me where I functioned the best is completely gone.”  
“We thought you were trapped in the change.”  
“Well you thought wrong,” Malia pushed her chair from the table. “Because I didn’t need saving. I was fine.”  
“I’d make it up to you if I could,” Stiles offered. His limbs were suddenly very heavy. He looked at the large letters that indicated the exit, but couldn’t make out the odd symbols that displayed themselves sideways, upside down and backwards highlighted in LED red.  
“Get Scott back here and get him to change me back.”  
“You and me both,” Stiles said as he slowly drifted into space. His fight was giving out. His struggle to resist was fading. Soon the Nogitsune would appear in his tatters and sharp protruding teeth and taunt him into submission, to coax him into gambling away his body, mind and soul.


End file.
